In the summer of 2006, several major news outlets gave prominent coverage to a sociological study with a grim message: Americans' social isolation had increased radically since the 1980s. Whereas in 1985, Americans reported that, on average, they had 2.94 friends or family members with whom they discussed important matters, by 2004 that number had dropped to 2.08. Those findings startled the study's authors, who are sociologists at Cornell University, Duke University, and the University of Arizona. Claude S. Fischer, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley who was an early pioneer in the study of social isolation, posted a working paper that argues that the study shouldn't be relied upon. Mr. Fischer speculates that something must have gone wrong in the collection or coding of the study's data. Mr. Fisher believes that the problems with the data are effects caused by the respondents' exhaustion with the survey.